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The Peter Principle

Nothing the Repuritans like better than a smug, young, hypocritical dogmatist. Especially if he's been home-schooled then dropped out of a good college to take a nepotist job with Dad's Party. If you can get 'em young enough, say about 24, you can send them off on all sorts of crazy missions that a more experienced felon would just laugh at. As in, "Say what? Fuck that, Kemosabe. I don't care how much unaudited cash there is floating around Iraq, you got to be alive to kick it back to the Party. Besides, I don't know dick about oil infrastructure."

But the Green Zone might be a really good career move for one Ben Domenech, formerly of William and Mary's Flat Hat, and now (Today Only!) of Washington Post online. Despite being half-Latino, it seems Box Turtle Ben is a racist. This doesn't disqualify him from work at the Post, of course. It seems he was hired to provide some reich-wing balance for people like George Will, Bob Novak, and Charles Krauthammer, who, being a little left of Goebbels, are not reich enough for the national jingosphere -- which of course makes up so much of the the Post's subscription base, so much of the market for their advertisers. Who knew that within the Beltway there is our own little demographic Idaho? The Post apparently needed somedboy who would eulogize Corretta Scott King by calling her a Communist. They needed someone who would joke about the extermination of black folk.

The problem for Ben is that he doesn't really do much of his own writing. It seems at the Flat Hat and at National Review Online, he pretty much always cut and pasted from other sources and passed the wordsmithing off as his own. He's a compulsive plagiarist. And he's even written his own diatribe against plagiarism! Chutzpah like that makes him perfect for Karl Rove's Party. But it also seems that he made the mistake of plagiarizing from the Washington Post itself. That can't sit well with the other staffers.

So long Ben. Don't forget to (snort! snerk!) ...write!

Update: Oops. Looks like Ben has caught the bus. But don't get all happy, folks; if current trends persist, his replacement will be much scummier.

posted by Kalkaino @ 8:39 AM